17
votes
Meetup.com pricing changes: Up to $3 total per RSVP to free events
@securestep9:
If you are using #MeetUp it's time to look for an alternative provider: from November they will charge you $1 per RSVP of a FREE event, so if you have 1000 attendees RSVP-ing to your FREE meetup you as the organiser will be charged $1000 per meetup https://t.co/eq78hPRW2b
In terms of alternatives, I saw Mobilizon mentioned. It's open source and federated, by Framasoft (the french open source folks who are known for developing Peertube). Looks very promising… unfortunately, it's not released yet. :|
There was another alternative, GetTogether, mentioned in that thread that is open source, federated and already operational.
It looks like they've changed the pricing (possibly a couple of times) today and now the organiser isn't getting charged for RSVPs. It was insane that they'd possibly contemplate that as a good idea.
However, I must say, you can't even buy a cup of coffee for $2. It seems that we've become so used to getting things for free online, even a small charge has really put people's noses out of joint. Meetup is providing a service, is it unreasonable for them to be compensated for this service?
Turns out bait and switch (sorry, I mean Startup MVP and Pivot, I apologise) comes with a cost - when you change things from free to not free people's expectations are no longer met and they get angry.
No sympathy for companies that base their existence on the idea that they can use prior use as leverage on a market.
Or perhaps what Meetup are currently charging isn't enough to sustain the business.
If that's the case, I'd be fascinated to know what they're spending their not-insubstantial existing revenue on - and I mean that genuinely!
They are getting compensated today already. But they're also popular because they provide a fairly cheap way for free meetups to organize themselves.
My board game group gets 30 ish people together a couple of times a week at a local restaurant and already spend easily avg $8 per person for food & drinks. This would be an extra $720 a month going to meetup. How much do you spend on coffee for this to be a fair cut for a glorified mailing list?
People are happy to pay $8 for food and drinks but not an extra $2 for the service that brought them together?
Food and drinks sustain you. The service brought us together once and beyond that I just RSVP so the organizer knows how many people to expect.
As a one time fee it would be reasonable. As a recurring fee it is not.
Again, wanting 720 dollars a month off a hobbyist board game group full of broke students is not a good business. When I made financial decisions as cto of my previous company, 720 dollars a month would be too much for anything that isn't core to the business. A business that made 1MM a year.
I've barely ever used Meetup.com, but as a relative outsider it feels like price gouging to me. Maybe $2/month for unlimited use would be reasonable, or perhaps even $10/month for an "organiser account" to set up events that are free to users. As you said further up the idea of putting a multiplicative burden on the organiser was insane, but even as a user the idea of paying $2 to click a button doesn't sit well with me.
[Edit] It turns out that the organiser is already paying over $10/month to use the service. This new pricing model seems utterly absurd to run a simple web service.
That's the current pricing model.
$1 or $2 per RSVP is highway robbery, nowhere near reasonable compensation for the corresponding tidbit of work being done. This is on top of the subscription fees the group organizer is already paying.
The subscription fees are being reduced.
I missed that part, thanks for pointing it out. That said, I still believe charging anything per-RSVP is unreasonable.
I've guy that does meetups charges $3 per person for their Meetup fees. At first it felt reasonable, but now Ive figured it's this dude's side hustle and some math shows that he's probably bringing in 500-1k/mo just organizing these meetups. Im guessing Meetup is after the revenue of guys like these...
But that's a pretty myopic view as the one's willing to dish out the $3 for a free hike are likely singles trying to develop those "organic" relationships. I don't see the non single crowd going for those fees.
We soured on MeetUp last year. Due to a change in payment methods, we accidentally lapsed on our account with them. They allowed a Bitcoin spammer to grab admin ownership of our organizational account and spam out to all our clients with a fake meetup to promote their bitcoin business. This was possible because, by Meetup's own policy, any member can take ownership of the organization if membership has lapsed. So there was a Bitcoin spammer account sitting in our membership list who grabbed it as soon as he could. Looking through, it looks like this is a common practice that this account engaged in, and others like it did as well.
...We're a government. Meetup allowed a Bitcoin spammer to take over a government account and spam with the look and name of a government. We had to explain to them why allowing that to happen is a terrible idea if they're trying to court businesses and governments.
Wow, what a clusterfuck.
I'm surprised they thought that would work at all. I can't imagine anyone paying $3 every time they rsvp. We already have issues with more people showing up than rsvping and this would just make it so no one does at all.
The price is so insanely high as well. A user could probably rsvp to 1000 events before using 1c worth of server resources. Sounds like the company grew too big and needs to suck a lot of money out of what is a very trivial website. The primary function of the website could be replicated by almost any web dev in a week. Literally the only value they add is having lots of users.
Personally, I gave up on Meetup 4-5 years ago, when they started screwing up (at least, IMO) the UI/UX.
Never actually got around to deleting my acct, erasing my footprint there. This seems like a good time...
Didn't really know where to post this… the pricing has changed a few times. The scariest version of it is this one which would cost attendees $2 per RSVP and organizers $1 per RSVP.
This kills Meetup for me; I will no longer be using it (even if they don't go through with this). Sad, because I'd constantly use it to find fun stuff to do in a new city. I even recommended it here several times.
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